Search for Jewish-Arab Kotel baby reveals startling story

JORDAN MOSHE

In a narrative which stretches from Hungary in World War II to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Harman found himself in the midst of a mystery which forms part of the history of Israel and the Jewish people.

Harman, the host and co-founder of the acclaimed Israel Story podcast, recounted to Limmud last weekend the story of Operation Hulda, a mission to solve a mystery that began in 1967.

Levy was 22 when he was called up to serve as a reservist for what would become the Six-Day War.

On the morning of 7 June 1967, Levy’s battalion of paratroopers entered Jerusalem’s Old City, and captured the Temple Mount. In the shadow of the Kotel, the group settled down in an alleyway near the wall.

“Suddenly we heard children screaming,” Levy said. “They came closer to us. It was two little kids yelling at the top of their lungs, ‘Doctor, doctor, doctor!”

Levy, battalion doctor Uri Frand, and Danny the medic followed the children into an Arab slum. They arrived at a home in which a Palestinian woman was in childbirth.

The three Jewish men brought a Palestinian girl into the world in the midst of one of Israel’s most important wars.

Four-and-a-half years after the end of the war, in January 1972, a journalist by the name of Mordechai Elkan was wrapping up a day of reporting in Jaffa, and came across the greatest story of his career in the form of a green-eyed woman named Yehudit Schwartz.

Born to secular Jewish parents in Budapest in 1927, Schwartz had not only survived a tumultuous upbringing but also the Holocaust, ending up in Israel after the war.

Schwartz befriended an Israeli Arab, Abu Walliyah, who lived in the old city of Jerusalem. “He invited her over,” Harman said. “They spent time together. Some believe he kidnapped her. Others told me she moved in with him willingly. Either way, that’s when the War of Independence broke out.

“When the armistice agreements were signed and the new international borders drawn up, Schwartz found herself in the old city, now part of Jordan, living as a Muslim woman.”

She had a miserable existence with Walliyah before he abandoned her, leaving with their two daughters for Amman. Schwartz remarried shortly thereafter, and in 1962, she gave birth to a girl, and three years later, to a baby boy.

These were the children whose cries for a doctor pierced the air in the old city during the Six-Day War. “Abie, Uri, and Danny had no idea, of course, that the Palestinian woman whose baby they had helped deliver was actually Yehudit Schwartz – a Jewish Holocaust survivor,” Harman said. “When Uri returned – as promised – to check on her, shortly after the war, she was gone

Schwartz later settled in Bnei Brak, and Levy returned to his native kibbutz. The group would reunite once more in 2004, when Schwartz would clarify that she was, indeed, abducted by her first husband. She died in 2009. The girl, named Hulda disappeared once more.

It was in 2018 that Levy reached out to Harman – Hulda was the woman he was trying to find.

“We got dozens and dozens of leads,” said Harman. “Most of them turned out to be dead-ends. “But then, a researcher sent us a link to a lifestyle blogpost about the wife of Israeli model Bar Refaeli’s hairstylist. A woman called Fanny Sabag.

To his astonishment, he’d found her.